


cut your losses

by mediest



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-17 11:48:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28599480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mediest/pseuds/mediest
Summary: Sylvain and Felix do a heist, defect from spy agencies, and other misc mini alternate universes written for twitter.
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 4
Kudos: 59





	1. they plan a casino heist

“Buy you a drink?”

Felix said through gritted teeth, “No thank you, _stranger._ ”

“Relax,” Sylvain said as he waved over the bartender. In the last week he’d flirted with every single person in the casino. It’d look weird if he didn’t flirt with Felix too. 

The outfit was a cute look, but Felix was a mediocre poker dealer. He wasn’t personable or friendly with the players. The players, in return, tipped him pennies. Every half hour the floor supervisor had to swap Felix out. She was losing her tolerance. The only thing saving Felix from being fired and blowing the whole operation two days too early was the fact that he was smooth and tight with the cards, and some of the players found Felix’s glacial front enticing instead of discouraging. They let themselves get lured in by the hook of Felix’s proud, cold face.

“Guess who I just saw in the lobby,” Sylvain said, leaning closer like one of those guys at the poker table, thinking Felix was a safe they could crack. 

“Who,” Felix said impassively. _What’s so important you’d go off-script?_

Sylvain’s mouth brushed Felix’s ear. “Hubert von Vestra.” 

On a late Thursday afternoon, the casino was only beginning to fill up. A few other patrons sat at the bar. Felix, a consummate professional, tilted his face towards Sylvain’s to listen. His jaw tensed imperceptibly. 

“It sounds like Rowe’s ready to sign over ownership,” Sylvain murmured. “Cash and stock deal, all Silver Maiden properties.”

“You’re telling me the money in that vault—”

“—is about to become Edelgard’s.”

He rested a hand provocatively on Felix’s lower back. He felt the next breath that Felix took.

Felix pulled away. “We need to tell Dimitri.”

Sylvain said nothing. When Felix glanced over, he gave Felix a smile, flat and unhappy.

Felix’s expression split open as he made the same realization. There was no way their fearless leader didn’t already know. This was the whole reason they were here. Three years served, newly paroled, and the first thing Dimitri did with that precarious freedom was run straight back at the woman who’d sent him to prison in the first place. 

“What do you want to do?” Sylvain said. He was losing some of his trust fund sleaze, watching as the disbelief and frustration kaleidoscoped across Felix’s face. “Do you want to walk away?”

That was the question, predictably, that made Felix square his shoulders. He’d always had an easier time identifying what he _didn’t_ want to do. 

“We’re two days out,” he said. “Let’s get the job done.”

Sylvain finished his drink. “I’ll keep an eye on von Vestra.”

“Don’t get too close,” Felix warned. 

“I know,” Sylvain said. 

He leaned in and smiled again. It still wasn’t exactly the right one. Now that he was this close up, he was distracted by the gold in Felix’s eyes.

“You should slap me,” he told Felix, “to keep our covers.”

“My character wouldn’t do that,” Felix said.

Sylvain had never known Felix to do an ounce of character work. “Why not?”

“He could’ve gotten up and left already,” Felix said. “It’s been too long. Now it looks like he’s into you.” 

Felix was right. Both the bartender and floor supervisor had just witnessed Felix willingly speaking to another person for longer than five minutes. Letting another person touch him as if they already knew it was allowed. 

Sylvain found his sleaze again. “What would he do, then?” 

He was expecting Felix’s mouth against his own, all five perfunctory seconds of contact, but not the way Felix gripped Sylvain’s thigh as he did it, using it for balance as he propelled himself forward into the kiss like a slowly turning lock.


	2. they're spies who're also exes

The body dredged out of the Potomac River was male, mid 30s. The Maryland harbor patrol unit pulled him out in his waterlogged Tom Ford suit, early Tuesday morning at 0530. Forensics performed a preliminary on-site analysis. He hadn’t been dead for more than a few hours. Untouched by algae or river scavengers. The decomp process was in its early stages. He wasn’t bloated or blue: dead before he hit the water. His tongue was swollen. Horizontal ligature marks around his neck. The garrote wire had done double duty, both strangling him and slicing open his carotid artery. 

Felix Fraldarius was in the wind by 0545, before SHIELD Director Eisner finished her morning run and poured her first cup of coffee. 

The commercial flight landed in Albuquerque. Felix changed his clothes and his wig in the airport bathroom. He smoked a cigarette and disposed of his passport. 

He took a cab to an address that he’d been sent one day from a disconnected number after half a year of nothing. He’d read the coded message and then deleted it immediately afterwards. To this day Felix couldn’t say if he’d memorized it intentionally. 

The address led to a small empty house in the suburbs. Felix waited outside. This was a desert town, red and yellow. The jagged mountains shifted colors with the sun. The sky was relentlessly blue. It beat down against Felix’s shoulders. He stood on an ancient golden scale, awaiting judgment.

Twenty minutes later Sylvain got out of his car and approached the house, keys in one hand, coffee in the other. Tight gray shirt and exercise shorts. From what Felix’d heard, Sylvain was still in physical therapy. He had a slight limp in his right leg when he walked. Felix didn’t think he was armed, but at his peak Sylvain could make a weapon out of anything. 

When he saw Felix in the shadow of his doorway, he didn’t react except to say, “I figured you’d be halfway across the Atlantic by now.”

“Eisner called you,” Felix said.

“She wanted a second opinion.” 

Felix waited for more. One way or another, Sylvain usually gave it. 

“I told her it was flashier than your typical MO, but what do I know anymore, right?” Sylvain said, unlocking his door. 

Sylvain entered his house without looking back over his shoulder. It was part of the performance: here’s my unguarded back, see how much I trust you. It was unpleasant to sit in the audience. It only reminded Felix of how it’d felt to receive the real thing. In truth, Sylvain had a bad habit of looking back. For him it was an impulse that itched if ignored. He liked to know you were doing okay. Half-dead, bleeding out, femur shot to pieces, and he’d look back to see where you were. 

Felix followed Sylvain and closed the door behind himself. Inside the house was warmly lit. When Sylvain quit SHIELD to come out west, Felix’d pictured Sylvain building himself a mudbrick tomb out in the desert. This tomb had well-curated art. Soft white and rose-hued clay paint. 

Felix was hit with a profound sense of not belonging, which was the exact definition of an unimportant emotion right now. 

“It wasn’t me,” he said instead. 

Sylvain set his coffee down on the kitchen island and opened the fridge. “Looked pretty similar, though.”

“That’s the idea.”

Five years ago Eisner sent a field team to Budapest to permanently take Felix off the board. The team’s commander recruited Felix away from the Red Room instead. Five years later the operatives on that team were washing up dead on riverbanks. It didn’t take a genius. The message: _nobody steals one of ours._

The copycat garrote was for Felix: _nobody leaves._

“SHIELD will come looking for you,” Sylvain said.

“Not for a few hours,” Felix said. Not here, after how he and Sylvain left each other. Why would Fraldarius’s first move be to revisit scorched earth?

Sylvain pulled out a carton of eggs. He studied Felix for a moment, then cracked his first grin. “You still make an awful blond.”

Felix took off the wig. He shook his hair out and scrubbed his hands through it a couple times. When he looked at Sylvain again, Sylvain was still smiling, like he had in Budapest, in that distinctive way of his, enough to make a fool want to defect. 

“You want some breakfast before we go hunting?”


	3. they're in the mafia but it's cf-route

Shit goes south in Derdriu and Felix isn’t there at the prearranged extraction point. Sylvain doesn’t make a habit of losing his cool, but that rule goes out the window the moment the message _aegis_ and a set of coded GPS coordinates blink onto his phone screen. 

Not for the first time. There’s a whole pile of rules lying in a broken heap outside the window, mutilated by the high fall. 

So he hops on a train to Derdriu. It’s a nice time of year to visit. The safehouse is located in a quiet neighborhood, posh as hell, lots of secret leafy passageways and aristocratic wealth. Sylvain loosens his tie as he climbs the building stairs. The cost of maintenance has gotta be bleeding Edelgard’s offshore bank accounts dry.

If Felix is off his game, it’s because kids somehow got involved. Sylvain is expecting an explosive creature inside the apartment: Felix Fraldarius with blood in his teeth, fuming at the assignment, at the two-faced Alliance mafia, at Edelgard always holding her cards so close to her chest.

What he gets is Felix Fraldarius shirtless with a sloppily patched gunshot wound in his left side, looking mostly fine and whole.

Sylvain’s emotions instantly recalibrate. The relief gets dialed up. So does the dread.

He closes the door behind himself. Noisier than he normally would, just to see how Felix responds. 

Felix’s gaze snaps over. His right arm goes for the piece under the couch cushion. He heard Sylvain come through the door but not up the stairs. Some part of him is far off-planet right now.

“Let me fix up that hole in your stomach first before you shoot at me,” Sylvain says calmly.

Felix’s arm goes slack. “I already took care of it.”

“You and whose toddler? Lie back.”

Felix grits his teeth but lies back. Sylvain kneels by the couch, getting eye-level with Felix’s gnarly abdomen. They both know how to dress a GSW better than this. 

Sylvain tosses the old bandage and cleans the wound. Felix doesn’t move, doesn’t say anything, doesn’t let on how bad it hurts. 

Sylvain is washing his hands for the third time when he hears Felix finally say, “I saw Dedue.”

Sylvain does _not_ let himself react to that. He looks at his own face in the mirror above the sink. “What was Dedue doing in Derdriu?”

“Trying to kill me,” Felix says tonelessly.

Nobody has seen Dedue in years. Not since Edelgard went to war with Fódlan’s queenpin. She wanted to modernize the mob. Dimitri wanted restitution for a generation of bad blood between their families. Rhea made a paranoid attack dog out of Dimitri; she used him to set the underworld on fire from Gronder to Tailtean, trying to put Edelgard in the ground. For almost five years, this shit dragged on: the dead suits from the Fhirdiad DA’s office, the public executions in restaurants and opera houses, the acid scar on Hubert’s face. Then Felix took a shot at Dimitri through the scope of a Remington and the bullet hit its target and then it kept on going, circling around the earth, hunting Felix back down. 

Sylvain comes back out of the bathroom when he’s ready, kneels beside Felix again, and applies a new bandage. 

There, all better. Now it looks less like a first grader’s self-loathing art project. 

“Want me to take a look at anything else?” 

“No,” Felix says. He sits up even though it must be painful, his muscles stretching and pulling with the motion. 

“Want to talk about it?” Sylvain asks.

Felix gives him a blank look. Sylvain smiles back. He can tell by Felix’s expression that Felix doesn’t like it.

“No,” Felix says, and then gets a hand on Sylvain’s tie and uses it to reel Sylvain into a hard kiss. 

Sylvain can’t say he’s surprised. He clasps Felix’s shoulders and kisses him back as gently as Felix will permit, until Felix makes a rough, shivery noise against Sylvain’s mouth. 

Aegis: a shield or an animal skin, depending on who you ask. Either way, it means protection. It’s the only version of an SOS that Felix knows how to communicate anymore.

Someday Felix isn’t gonna call or text. Someday Felix is gonna crawl into an alley like a wounded animal or bleed out in some splashy hotel in Morfis, and what the hell is Sylvain gonna do then? He could be back in Enbarr running business for Edelgard, brokering her armistice with Claude. Instead he’s just aiming Felix at new people to kill. Edelgard must’ve known when she allowed him to be Felix’s handler, the leash goes both ways. This is the only path Felix sees for himself, so there’s no other path for Sylvain either. On this whole barbaric planet there has to be at least one thing Sylvain’s capable of being loyal to.


	4. they're time traveling back from a future robot war--it's complicated

There were only ever two possibilities, whenever Felix picked up the phone. The first was that the person calling was Dimitri, a teenager who Felix knew from the future as a burdened, idealistic, dauntless lion of a man. The second was that it was Rodrigue, and Felix would hear his father, barely into his forties, who Felix knew from the future as being dead. 

Neither option was better, so Felix didn’t waste his breath checking the number anymore. This time it was Dimitri. 

“Are you in trouble?” Felix said.

“No,” Dimitri was quick to respond. “Everything’s fine. Rodrigue has a new lead on the list of Skynet targets.”

“I’m in the middle of something,” Felix said. “I can be back at the house in a few hours.”

“All right,” Dimitri said, in that young, polite, foreign voice. Then he asked, “Are _you_ in trouble? You sound—”

“I’m fine,” Felix said. “See you soon.”

He hung up for his own good. He looked back at Sylvain, who was still lying naked on his front, his body fucked warm and pliant, his expression growing cool again right under Felix’s gaze. 

Having sex in a soft hotel bed. It was unimaginable. Having sex before a proper debrief, that was just stupid. Felix was just this side of lonely enough to act a bit stupid. 

“Explain it to me again,” Felix said.

*

Sylvain didn’t come back in time to stop the war, he came back to take hot showers. Indulge in fluffy towels. Trees and dogs and sunsets and actual weather and food instead of “food”. Air that didn’t blacken your lungs. If Felix wanted to call that going AWOL, whatever. Sylvain just wanted to rest. 

“There’s metal everywhere back home,” Sylvain said. He kept one arm pillowed under his head as the other hand traced a muscle in Felix’s upper thigh. Back and forth, as if he expected something else to appear. 

Felix’d noticed some differences of his own. The left side of Sylvain’s torso was littered with new surgical scars that hadn’t been there before. 

For now he leaned back against the headboard and chose not to ask. Sylvain kept touching, just enough pressure to keep it from tickling. Beyond the face, the rank and the service number, it was the most convincing piece of evidence that this was Sylvain. He knew how to treat Felix’s body. 

“Dimitri has reprogrammed machines stationed at every base,” Sylvain added. “They’re practically running Arianrhod.”

“He has his reasons,” Felix felt it necessary to defend. Machines were replaceable; humans weren’t. That’s what Dimitri would say in a decade or so, after Rodrigue died.

Sylvain only shrugged. “It doesn’t matter anymore. I’m done with that.” He leaned closer to kiss Felix’s thigh. “I just want to be here with you.”

Felix couldn’t decide on what to feel. Contempt and anger at Sylvain for leaving his post. Shameful relief at seeing Sylvain again, regardless of the reason. This spot of familiarity in an alien green land. Sylvain may be a weak man, but at least he was alive.

“We could use the extra manpower hunting down Skynet,” Felix said. “Since you’re here anyway.”

“I don’t know,” Sylvain said, after a moment. “My schedule’s pretty full.”

“With what? Sitting by the pool getting drunk and waiting for the world to end?”

“Even you can’t deny that sounds pretty good,” Sylvain said with a slight grin. Infuriating. Felix touched Sylvain’s mouth on an impulse. Sylvain obliged him, closing his lips around Felix’s thumb. He had a look of contentment, eyes half-closed, lashes sweeping low against his cheeks as he sucked. Jesus. 

“I have to get back soon,” Felix said, before he could get too interested again. Sylvain looked even more tempting here, where all the world’s warmth came from sunlight and—and basic heating amenities instead of nuclear fire.

Sylvain popped Felix’s wet thumb out of his mouth. “You know where to find me.”

“At the bar?” Felix scoffed.

Sylvain smiled strangely. He was touching the spot on Felix’s thigh again, marking out an absence.

*

Two weeks later Felix found the surveillance photos of Dimitri under the hotel bed. 

When Sylvain came out of the shower, the photos were strewn all over the desk and Felix was sitting on the edge of the bed with a gun aimed at Sylvain’s chest. 

“You get thirty seconds,” Felix said, ice cold.

“Even I can’t talk that fast,” Sylvain said. 

Felix didn’t grant him any reaction. Being stonewalled made Sylvain more visibly frustrated. Good.

“You’ve been gone,” Sylvain said. “You haven’t seen how bad it’s gotten, with the decisions he’s making. He’s putting everyone in danger. He only ever consults with metal anymore, and if he has us living with the machines and taking their orders, then tell me what’s the fucking point?”

“Why did you come back,” Felix gritted out.

“I just want to talk to him.” Sylvain approached, ignoring the threat of Felix’s gun, and grabbed a photo off the desk. It was of all three of them, Dimitri and Rodrigue and Felix. “Why did you come back? To play house?”

Felix’s face burned. He grabbed the photo out of Sylvain’s hand. “Don’t push me right now.” 

In lowering his gun, he left an opening. Sylvain came even closer. Felix recognized this person. He did not know him. The visible scarring of his left side made Felix’s instincts scream. He couldn’t stop looking at it until Sylvain gripped his chin and lifted his face. It was gentler than Felix expected. Sylvain looked sincerely imploring. 

“I’m here to save him,” he said. It was Sylvain who was dangerous. Desperate people always were. “I’m here to save us.”


End file.
